Reading “The Lord of the Rings”: “Journey to the Cross-Roads,” “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol,” and “Shelob’s Lair”

In today’s entry, we follow Frodo and his companions as they make their way beyond Ithilien and cross into the dark Morgul Vale, where they see the fearsome Lord of the Nazgûl ride out at the head of an army that has at last been unleashed upon the forces of the West, before encountering the vengeful, loathsome spider known as Shelob.

There has always been something terrifyingly evocative about the sequence in which Frodo, Sam, and Gollum see the Witch-king of Angmar ride out from Minas Morgul at the head of his enormous army that will prove all too effective at bringing the city of Minas Tirith to its knees. This sequence makes quite clear that this terrible power is indeed one of the most formidable weapons that the Dark Lord has brought to bear upon those who would seek to resist him. Further, the power of Tolkien’s prose is such that you feel as if you were actually there with the trembling hobbits, drawn by the same almost irresistible force of will that seems determined to overthrow Frodo’s will and force him to reveal himself.

Furthermore, there is something equally terrifying about the nature of the Morgul Vale itself, full as it is of the malevolent flowers that seem to exist on the poisoned and rotten earth of the valley, filling the very air itself with the noxious stench at atmosphere of death. One cannot help but realize that this, indeed, is one of the greatest tragedies of the continuing influence of Sauron’s evil upon Middle-earth, that he can take even such a beautiful place as Minas Ithil, the Tower of the Moon, and turn it into something foul and rotten, as full of death and decay as Minas Tirith is light, joy, and vitality.

However, in the midst of all this terror, horror, and despair, there is Frodo, still struggling to find his way to fulfill his quest despite all of the forces arrayed against him. It is also a moment in which we are given a hint of the extent of Frodo’s injury way back at Weathertop, as the wound in his shoulder continues to exert a particularly pernicious sort of hold over his present. Here, we are already getting an inkling that this would will continue to haunt him and keep him from ever truly attaining the peace that he will richly deserve once he accomplishes what he set out to do.

These chapters also include one of my absolute favourite sequences in the entire novel, in which Gollum has one of those rare moments in which he seems to be almost on the cusp of at last finding the redemption that has eluded him for so long. The novel takes particular pains to show us that even now, even after all that has happened, there is still a faint (admittedly very faint) hope that he might yet be redeemed:

“For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.”

And yet, tragically, Sam misinterprets Gollum’s intentions, and the moment “passed, beyond recall.” From this point on there will be no doubt that Gollum is beyond the reach of the light and beauty of the world. Sam’s reproach, as justified as it might seem to him at that moment, nevertheless sows the seeds for Gollum’s later actions. Gollum, as pitiful and wretched as he is, has a part to play that is larger than he or the hobbits realize.

There can be no question that Shelob is one of the most terrifying creatures to emerge from Tolkien’s mythology. A last living vestige of the destructive and malevolent Ungoliant that proved to be so destructive in the First Age, Shelob is one of those extraordinary creatures in Tolkien’s world that seem to exist in their own moral universe. There is no question that she is an evil creature, full of all of the relentless malice and restless destruction that always characterize

In the next installment of our series, we finally get to see the terrible choice that Sam has to make, between continuing on with the Quest or giving up all hope.

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2 comments

Troelsfo
· January 21, 2017

There seems to be something missing from your comments on Shelob, and I’d be very interested to hear what you mean by saying that Shelob belongs to a category of creatures that “seem to exist in their own moral universe”?

I suppose what I meant was that she doesn’t have an alliance with any of the existing powers that are competing for control of Middle-earth. While Sauron allows her to continue living on his borders, she doesn’t owe him anything, and she doesn’t really have a political purpose of her own. She is, in other words, just restless malice that doesn’t really have an aim. Now that I’ve given it some more thought, I suppose I should have used the phrase “political universe,” since that’s closer to what I meant.